Swimming with spacemen: The image gallery

Space suits, space ships, and more—46 more pics we couldn't not show off.

Our in-depth tour of NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory left us with waaaaay more photos than we could possibly use in the one feature. Rather than never letting them see the light of day, here are 46 pictures that we couldn't quite fit into the piece but which were just too good not to share.

Lee Hutchinson

One of the four jib cranes used to lower astronauts, two at a time, into the pool. This one is attached to a platform onto which the astronauts will be anchored once they're in their suits.

Lee Hutchinson

One of the four jib cranes used to lower astronauts, two at a time, into the pool. This one is attached to a platform onto which the astronauts will be anchored once they're in their suits.

Lee Hutchinson

SCUBA equipment for the divers is set up at the pool's edge before the dive, ready to be strapped on.

Lee Hutchinson

Astronaut Chris Cassidy waits for the suit-donning procedure to begin. Visible on his back are the yellow air return lines for his liquid cooling and ventilation garment (LCVG).

Lee Hutchinson

Unlike normal pants-go-on-one-leg-at-a-time humans, astronauts put on their EMU pants both legs simultaneously. However, in the absence of microgravity, this technique requires a bit of assistance.

Lee Hutchinson

Cassidy wiggles about in his EMU pants to ensure that they're snugged correctly into place.

Lee Hutchinson

It takes some more assistance to shoehorn Cassidy into the upper half of his spacesuit.

Lee Hutchinson

Cassidy dons and connects his "Snoopy helmet," a soft head covering designed to hold his communications gear in place.

Lee Hutchinson

Cassidy signals that the suit-up is going A-OK.

Lee Hutchinson

Cassidy dons the "low-fi" NBL helmet. Unlike the helmet on a flight-ready suit, this one lacks complex electronics or sun visors.

Lee Hutchinson

The morning's dive paused for a fair amount of time to deal with a problem on ESA Astronaut Parmitano's suit communications system. Cassidy endured the pause without complaint—to be an astronaut is to be familiar with waiting.

Standing at the edge of the pool just off of the S1 truss, part of the immense Integrated Truss Structure, which forms the station's "backbone."

Lee Hutchinson

Looking down at the P4 and P5 truss mock-ups, with a mock-up of one of the Solar Alpha Rotary Joints (or SARJ) attached. Each SARJ is connected to a pair of solar arrays and allows the arrays to rotate and track the sun (or to orient the arrays so that aerodynamic drag is minimized at night).

This mural on the southern wall of TC-A depicts the NBL's role in both space flight and the universal quest for knowledge. Below the mural are patches from some of the missions which trained in the NBL.

Bert Knight demonstrates the location of a spacesuit's umbilical connections. The connections are on the suit's DCM (display and control module) and are used while the suit is being donned and prepped for EVA.

This tiny locking cam on one of the boots is used to make small adjustments to the length of a suit's leg. Spacesuits are precisely customized for each astronaut, but they aren't completely bespoke—it's possible for astronauts to share gear if needed.

ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano's pool gloves, adjusted and prepared for diving. Fitting a suit is complex enough, but glove fittings require a far greater amount of care and customization. More time is spent making sure the gloves fit correctly than is spent on any other suit component. Visible at lower right is the connector for the glove's electrical heater, to help keep the astronaut's fingers warm.

Detail view of a mini-workstation. This is affixed to an astronaut's chest and holds all of the tools he or she needs during an EVA—or, here, during a dive.

Lee Hutchinson

Here, the same type of mini-workstation is bedecked with tools and ready to be used for the day's dive. Front and center, clipped to the white retention ring, is the End Effector Tool, or "Grabber Daddy." The Grabber Daddy is used to temporarily attach an astronaut to a structure, a method called "local tethering." The Grabber Daddy lets the astronaut float freely; for an immobile connection that holds him fixed in position, the astronaut will employ the Body Restraint Tether, or BRT, which can be seen looping up from the right of the picture. The BRT's jaws are clamped to the center of the mini-workstation.

Knight shows off the BRT, or Body Restraint Tether. This amazing contraption is made up of a series of socketed balls with a grabber assembly on the end. The socketed balls move freely, allowing the tether to be completely flexible, but they are connected together by a wire. When the end of the tool is rotated, the wire pulls on the balls, locking them into their sockets and rigidizing the tool. Astronauts use the BRT to clamp themselves into a fixed position relative to their work surface, or to drag tool bags along behind them.

In the north equipment bay stands a pool-worthy Orion test article. Orion will splash down into the ocean like the much older Apollo capsules, so this full-scale model was used to test the spacecraft's stability at various altitudes in the water, and also to train Navy crews on how to recover the spacecraft's parachutes.

This is a spare S0 truss module, in storage in the south equipment bay. Unlike all of the modules in the pool, this is an actual flight-ready piece of hardware. It was one of two S0 segments manufactured; this one was used in a series of stress and vibration tests and was then put in storage. Its twin was launched into space.

Behind the NBL, near the rear fence, sit lonely testing modules and gear marked for destruction. Pictured are a pair of large ISS mock-up modules that look to be MPLM replicas, along with what appears to be an S3 or P3 truss mock-up, awaiting their trip to the junk yard. NASA tries to find uses for the modules when their useful testing life is over—sometimes as artificial reefs—but typically the components are crushed and scrapped.

These tanks are part of the NBL's redundant breathing gas storage system. The cranes which lift the astronauts into and out of the water are pneumatic, and in the event of a failure of their main and backup compressed air supplies, they can be operated from the breathing gas storage.

These photographs chronicle the building's transformation from a space station integration facility with a perfectly smooth air bearing-quality floor to the world's largest swimming pool. At bottom is a picture from the NBL's very first dive, back in 1997.

Some more mementos from the astronaut corps. Most of the items, like this T-shirt, were flown in space before being framed for display.

NASA - Dan Sedej

A diagram of the NBL pool's layout as of February 2013. Right is north, so the jib cranes that lower the astronauts into the pool are on the top (west) side of the diagram. The station's fore-to-aft axis is vertical in the diagram (running west/east). For a good explanation of each of the ISS modules listed here, check this page.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.